Customer Reviews

Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness (Bradford Books)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Scientists don't necessarily make good novelists; Ian Stewart's Flatterland is a case in point. Dan Lloyd has a wicked sense of humor, however, and captures his protagonist, a sardonic philosophy graduate student, perfectly. I'm less enthusiastic about the so-called theory of consciousness the novel is supposed to set forth, which attempts to merge brain scans with Husserl. And readers should be forewarned that a working knowledge of neural networks and multi-dimensional scaling is very helpful.

What is it about the new neuroscience that sometimes causes uneasiness in people when it is contemplated? This has been communicated to me many times by colleagues, co-workers, and business associates with whom I have discussed neuroscience over the years. The story in this book is brilliant if viewed from the standpoint of the moods that accompany the contemplation of the conscious mind from the perspective of contemporary experimental neuroscience. It captures, through its main character, the disquieting feelings that one sometimes gets when thinking about the true nature of consciousness from a scientific viewpoint. It is very perplexing that such feelings exist when examining something that is so close to us. Do we not want to believe that our consciousness can be explained according to the conceptions of modern neuroscience, with its mathematical models of neurons and neuronal connections, all validated with the experimental tool of fMRI? Does scientific description and analysis of consciousness trivialize it so that we no longer feel unique and retain a special, integrated "I-ness", but instead a collection of neuronal impulses and a bundle of Machian sensations?

This book is unique in that the author has chosen to present his ideas on consciousness using a story, with the rigorous scientific statements of his ideas coming after the story is over, in part 2 of the book, which the author has named "The Real Firefly". His ideas, as I see them, could loosely be described as a scientific justification of Husserlian phenomenology. He is honest enough to say though that much work remains to be done. Thankfully the time when the study of consciousness was solely a philosophical affair is over. Scientific experiments are now being done to elucidate the phenomenon of human consciousness, and this hopefully will lead to a better understanding of the brain outside of what philosophy has given us so far. The armchair speculations of philosophy are being put aside in favor of a careful, scientific approach. Thought experiments, the most popular of philosophical toolboxes, have failed to give us anything substantive. True knowledge is difficult to obtain, but the patience and fortitude of the researchers in neuroscience will no doubt bring about exciting developments.

The author is clearly optimistic about the possibility of science giving a complete explanation of human behavior. One can bet on this "radical pipe dream" he says. But again, he expresses an intellectual honesty about the difficulty of this goal, and the doubts that he himself has about his research. This doubt he says, causes him and others to sometimes exaggerate the current status of research, giving it a kind of "infomercial" overtone. But the goal of this research is to show how consciousness is part of the natural world, and this is to be done however, not with the tools of current cognitive neuroscience, but with a scientific interpretation of phenomenology. The author gives his reasons for rejecting contemporary cognitive neuroscience in the early paragraphs of part 2. He criticizes in great detail for example the "Detection Theory of Consciousness", with its assumption that the detection of complexity in the environment can be done by "matching" it in consciousness.

The author's theories of consciousness are built on phenomonology, but which he calls a "subjective view of objectivity". To contrast this with ordinary phenomonology, such as Husserl's method of "bracketing", he asserts that the world outside the mind is already bracketed, that one has an "inescapable experience of the real as real". He then constructs step by step a justification of these assertions, with intentionality being the first step; superposition, which he defines as a symbiosis of object and interpretation, the second step; transcendence, which enables us to distinguish imaginary properties from real is the third; temporality, which asserts that reality is temporal and allows comparisons through time, is the fourth. The next three steps are refined notions of temporality, the first being the conscious present, which includes the awareness of temporal context, the second being an ordinal notion of temporality, which orders moments in time and is assuredly monotonic. The third is more sophisticated, and is called recursive retention, which provides a recursive nested trace of the succession of past moments.

This subjective view of objectivity is still phenomonology for the author, and so a successful scientific view of consciousness for him must then involve an "objective view of subjectivity". To do this, he brings in the tools of artificial neural networks and their validation using fMRI, and he deals with the consequent demand for reducing the dimensionality of the acquired data. Certain "multivariate tests" are used to detect the necessary conditions for consciousness in the brain. He uses three instances of what he calls "indices of temporality" to get a handle on the time series data extracted from fMRI: the temporal gradient, which measures absolute temporality, and is a monotonically increasing, the relative temporal gradient, which is a measure of the brain's sensitivity to position in a sequence of data, and the stimulus similarity gradient. which determines to what extent the distributed neural activity in the brain is sensitive to conditions that remain the same during an experiment. This index is interesting, for it has as its goal a sort of measure of "stability" in the phenomenal world. These three indices allow the author to "interpret the brain over time". He then deals with the internal temporal structures of the brain, i.e. with what the phenomonologist called protention, presence, and retention. Retention in the brain in particular, is modeled again by neural networks, and experiments are conducted to illustrate just how well they do their jobs in this regard. The author ends the book with a positive and optimistic view of future research in neuroscience, a future, which, regardless of its content, will certainly be fascinating to witness.

It has been my experience that many students in introductory undergraduate philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience courses have a difficult time wrapping their heads around some of the more complicated issues relating to how consciousness is represented in brain, what tasks it may be performing, and what techniques are available for investigation. While Dan Lloyd may be pursuing lofty goals by mixing novel science with fiction, I found that he has managed to strike a good balance here, and may have produced a text well fit to supplement a primary text and lecture material for some of these introductory courses. By being placed in the shoes of a philosophy graduate student coming across some of the pertinent issues of brain study for the first time, the reader is exposed to a beautifully rich existential conscious experience, and is forced to question the nature of his\her own consciousness, an essential part of any encounter with brain study. Thought provoking and fun.

I wanted to like this. Some examples of fiction by scientists work brilliantly, and grad-student angst has a special tang that resonates deeply with me. A few things nagged at me early on, like characters' names. "Max Grue," the obnoxious advisor for example (grue: a strong aversion). Or "Claire Lucid," the psychologist. C'mon.

What really sank this book for me was its attempts to mix scientific speculation with a story I cared about. That can and has been done well, many times over, but not by means of lectures dressed up as Socratic dialogs. I admit, I got about 150 pages in and decided the book wasn't worth finishing. If something wonderful happens after that point, I apologize for any mis-impression caused by my incomplete information. By that point, however, I just couldn't believe something good enough to redeem the story would come through.

Good books end up on cut-out tables, through no fault of their own. So do richly deserving titles like this.

-- wiredweird

This review aims to give potential readers an idea of the subject, style, and value of Radiant Cool by Dan Lloyd. Based on consciousness and phenomenology, or " the philosophical effort to characterize the essential structures of experience" (as found on Lloyd's website: [...]), the book was entertaining and enlightening to a degree, but some parts were difficult to read, which, at those moments, left me wondering if I would get the point. In my opinion, readers like me, who have an interest in the area of consciousness in neuroscience, although with, perhaps, meager knowledge in the subject, are the intended audience. Otherwise, why format the book in two parts: first a novel to wet the palate over consciousness ideas and then a theoretical, explanation-based section (which Dan Lloyd refers to as the index) to clarify and expound upon what was in the novel? I believe Dan Lloyd did not quite achieve the language necessary for the target audience, but the way he wrote it was a decent attempt to explain consciousness to phenomenological beginners.

Part one: the novel
Lloyd writes the first part from the point of view of Miranda Sharpe, a graduate student of phenomenology. The plot is certainly enthralling as Miranda shares her experiences of anxiety and discovery in her dark-humorous manner. From starting the day without being sure if her advisor, Dr. Grue, is dead, the subsequent search for him by herself and other faculty, her discovery of what Dr. Grue has uncovered in understanding consciousness, the chaos bug disturbing the lives of all campus residents and their dependence on their computers, and the eventual "showdown" in Dan Lloyd's (the alter ego of the writer himself) living room, there is certainly enough suspense to keep readers interested. However, the meat of the story is in the discussions and findings of what Dr. Grue has compiled in consciousness theory. This is interspersed throughout the novel as Miranda's day progresses, but her presentation of what she finds is not always comprehensible to readers since it's made of the thoughts of a deep-thinking phenomenologist. This leads readers to seek more information or some form of explanation for parts of Miranda's story, which can be found in the second section of the book, the index.

Part two: the index
I am not the type to indulge in philosophical discussions, but I'm afraid I should have practiced more before reading this book. I should have expected it, though, considering the author is a professor of philosophy. These sections of the book required a great deal of patience on my part due to the philosophical characteristics imbued in the message. The whole index is very intensive (chapters 3 and 4 a bit more than 1 and 2): it requires undivided attention and patience for eventual explanation. What I mean is Dan Lloyd builds up some concepts with a lot of background that may leave the readers scratching their heads until he gets to the main point of the section, which would not have made sense had he not given the initially confounding information.

Even once I'd finished the book, I still had a sense that someone had stuck a spoon in my skull and gave my brain a few good stirs. Lloyd knew readers might feel that way, for he wrote, "To what extent, then, has this book explained and predicted natural phenomenology? One can set the standard for success with reference to one's favorite example of scientific discovery...there is that satisfying aha as the pieces click into place. I predict that readers did not experience their personal click as the book unfolded..." He explains that the readers' "aha" is missing because the complexity of consciousness is such that our current methods of analyzing it do not allow us to fully understand it or measure it and further, greater interpretations are needed.

In summary, Radiant Cool is a fascinating read, although one that requires a good deal of brain power. If readers want to learn something about consciousness or phenomenology, this book is a pleasant, different way to go about it because of its dual novel/theory style rather than conventional textbook learning. Maybe other readers will experience the whirring brain phenomenon I had every time I paused to let what I'd read sink in.

For a professor who has done a great deal of scientific research, this is an interesting read. His knowledge of the Brodmann areas is very useful.

The science is: brains are like neural nets; a hidden layer with feedback gives nets the ability to detect temporal patterns; information/logic in a net is distributed. That's it, plus some rambling about Husserl that seems largely irrelevant (if you're curious it's summarised pretty well by the review above (by the "top 100 reviewer" who apparently never gives below 4 stars...))

So if you're at all interested in consciousness, you probably know the science. If you don't, then I assume you've read a bit more than the typical science nerd and expect a basic level of narrative competence - you're going to be disappointed. The fiction part is embarassingly bad. The plotting is appalling; the characterisation cartoon-like.

Some reviewers are saying this would be good for an introductory course. It would have to be very introductory.

(I see that this book is currently being offered with Papadimitriou's "Turing". That's not a great book, either, but it's stunningly good compared to this - it has warmth, wit and depth. The closest this book gets is a painful irony; the cover suggest that someone, somewhere, was hoping for a noir ambience, but the only darkness comes from a power cut).

I feel bad writing a negative review, because I guess this was a work of love. I can understand the desire to popularise ideas that you find interesting. But please, if you're going to take my money, give me something at least half-way decent. If I were the author I'd be pretty mad with the editors at MIT for letting me publish something this bad.

And finally, I note that one star is the lowest rating possible, which is rather sneaky of Amazon (doesn't their use of the arithmetic mean imply a zero-based scale?).

[Later - for a stunning treatment of similar material see Power's Galatea 2.2]

As one writer put it, this would be a good book to assign as part of an introduction to neuroscience, or as a text in a philosphy course. It does not really work as a novel. Everyone is just too overwrought over nothing. These are pretty abstract ideas to become this hysterical about.